[Wikipedia-l] $6,000 goal reached!

Sun Oct 12 05:01:45 UTC 2003

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Stevertigo wrote:
>  
>
>>Congratulations on your sucessful and sustainable NPO
>>startup.  I would add that Brion isnt the only skilled
>>developer who gives his valuable time and skills to
>>WP, though.
>>    
>>
>
>That's absolutely true and I meant no favoritism.  But it has to be
>said that Brion does a lot of 'grunt work' that isn't that fun, and as
>Erik put it to me the other day, the entire project would have
>collapsed months ago without him.
>  
>
Not to mitigate Brion's work, which is certainly very valuable, but 
development work also isn't the only useful thing that goes on at 
Wikipedia (as many sites seem to forget).  For example, a good use of 
funds (in my mind) would be to pay researchers a minimal token salary 
for adding information on relatively un-fun but 
need-to-be-in-an-encyclopedia topics.  Currently everyone is 
volunteer-only, and if I were to pick one place to start going to "paid 
labor", I'm not sure it'd be the backend side of things.

-Mark